


Season of Grace

by SilverDagger



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Holidays, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 05:55:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3163781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's nothing kind about the Midgar slums, even during the holidays, but despite everything, Tifa has managed to find somewhere she belongs.</p><p>Hints of Tifa/Barret but mostly gen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Season of Grace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lirillith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirillith/gifts).



There's no snow beneath the plate, but that doesn't mean the cold doesn't filter its way down through layers of steel and concrete, into the slums beneath. Tifa's breath steams in the air as she makes her way back to Seventh Heaven, and condensation is forming icicles on the pipes that run and tangle overhead. Even wrapped in layers of wool from her boots to her fingertips, she's cold, and the heatless glow of the overhead lighting doesn't help.

Nibelheim winters were worse. But Nibelheim was kinder in winter too, a neighbor always ready with an armful of firewood, a mug of cider to chase the cold away. No one here will look you in the eye. Or maybe no one here will look her in the eye, knowing her reputation and the company she keeps.

She's never bothered hiding the fact that Seventh Heaven is a front for criminal activities. Half the businesses beneath the plate qualify for that distinction, and another fourth aspire to, and it's easier sometimes to misdirection suspicion than to avoid it. Her bar might shelter money launderers or dealers or thieves, perpetrators of any number of small infractions Shinra doesn't care enough about to waste money preventing. They pay their dues to the Company and the Company's enforcers, and that's the only thing that really matters down here. And it's a good bar, Seventh Heaven, and Tifa mixes a mean cocktail and doesn't tolerate violence on the premises unless she's the one enacting it, and that's enough neutral ground to convince anyone else who might care to turn a blind eye to almost anything.

Of course, it's not _just_ a good bar, or a good cover. It's the safest place she knows, and as she traverses the increasingly recognizable twists and alleys of Sector Seven, she's eager to be back.

 _Closed,_ the sign on the door says when she gets there, Jessie's messy, looping writing, and someone's been lighting candles in the windows. _Jessie,_ Tifa thinks, because it's the sort of thing Jessie would do, sentimental beneath a veneer of hardness, or maybe the other way around. Then she sees Barret lifting Marlene up with one arm as the little girl leans forward, clutching a long match with a tiny flame dancing on the end of it. Tifa's first thought is that he shouldn't be letting her play with fire like that, not so young, but nobody thinks like that in the slums - if she can't handle a bit of fire, how the hell will she ever learn to deal with worse? There's a logic there that Tofa can't deny, even if she rebels against it.

Marlene twists around to wave to Tifa as she steps into the room, and Barret deftly plucks the match from her hand and sets her down to run across the barroom floor and throw herself like a small guided missile at Tifa's knees. The entire room smells like candles, clean smoke mingling with the overlaid scents of alcohol and machine oil that always linger here, the faded remnants of tobacco. Biggs and Wedge are at a table with a Triple Triad deck, playing for last week's wages, and Jessie's in the corner with a book, sitting hunched over a bowl of noodles like some kind of paranoid vulture no matter how many years it's been since anyone tried to steal her food. But from the look of things she's actually managed to fix the heater and find some fuel besides, and someone has hung holly in the corners - gods alone know where they found it down here - and when Tifa peels off her jacket and gloves she can feel the warmth of the little room wrapping around her, sending safety-signals down all her muscles and right on through to her hindbrain.

 _Home,_ she thinks. Almost. Almost home. She scoops Marlene up into a spin, carries her across the room and back to her papa's arms, and thinks, _close enough._

"You get that order in?" Barret asks as Tifa hands Marlene over. She nods. Copies of the discs are in her pack, sitting snug inside the hollowed-out back cover of _Forbidden Passions, Volume IV: Shinra Nights,_ and if anyone at the security checkpoints really feels the need to search that closely through three-hundred-odd pages of dubiously typeset office worker erotica, she figures they aren't really looking for contraband data to begin with. The point being, the blueprints and the entry codes are safe. They're actually going to do this, and it's going to be soon.

"We should be set for the holiday rush," she says. Biggs and Wedge high five each other across the table, and Jessie looks up from her meal with sudden focus, her attention for once entirely on the here and now. Even Barret relaxes visibly, lines easing in his face, and for a moment he looks younger, or happier, or something harder to quantify. He's a handsome man, when his face isn't drawn right with worry or made bleak by anger. It's funny how she's never noticed that before.

"Good to hear it," he says, clapping her heavily on the shoulder with his good hand, and the warmth of his palm bleeds through her shirt until he steps away. He sets Marlene down again, waits until she wanders off in Biggs and Wedge's direction, and then says, "how long's it gonna take before we're ready to go?"

"We're ready now," she says, "or as soon as we need to be. But, you know..."

"Yeah?"

"I think maybe we shouldn't worry about that right now."

He frowns at her. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Solstice night tomorrow," she says, and looks over in Marlene's direction. "The kid needs a holiday, don't you think?" She doesn't say _she's not the only one,_ because she knows what it's like to have your pride and your mission and not much else, and she knows exactly how _she_ would react if someone told her she needed a break - but Barret's eyes go soft again, watching Wedge teach Marlene to play Triple Triad and Biggs pretend to lose, and it occurs to her that _not much else_ isn't all that accurate for any of them any longer.

"Yeah," Barret says, "guess she does, doesn't she?"

He smiles a little, just barely, lines creasing again around the corners of his eyes. It's a long while before he moves or looks away, and Tifa wonders what he's thinking about, and if she ought to say something or let him have this moment to himself. Then something seems to shake him back to the present, and he turns back like he's just remembered she's there.

"Alright, you convinced me," he says, affecting a gruffness that can't quite overcome the remnants of his smile. "For Marlene's sake only, you hear? Now sit your ass down and take a load off, I'll get us some cider. And make sure that good-for-nothing ain't teaching my kid to gamble."

"I don't think he'd dare," Tifa says, "but you never know. She might turn out to be good at it."

She'll have to be, probably, growing up around here. Midgar's no city for children, and no matter how many aunts and uncles well-versed in explosives she has, someday Marlene's going to have to learn to keep her own self safe.

It's a good thing, then, that she has all of them around to teach her, and that Tifa and Barret both would walk through fire to keep her safe. And Biggs and Wedge, too, and Jessie, and hell, probably a few of the Seventh Heaven regulars, not quite as heartless as the image they try to project. Think about it like that, she could almost learn to like this city.

Barret comes back holding two steaming mugs with one hand, and even though Tifa can tell from here that Wedge does in fact appear to be teaching Marlene to gamble - and to cheat - he looks happy still. She doesn't blame him. The cider is sweet with a hint of sharpness, hot enough to warm her from the inside out, and it's not so strange to realize that she's happy too, here, with him.

Nibelheim was kinder, but Midgar is where they are now. Now snow on the windowsills, but candles, and holly, and - family, she thinks. And that's not a word she ever attached to Avalanche before, but it feels right, and she's not going to argue.

Somewhere out there, the world is going by. For the first time in a long time, she's content to let it.


End file.
